A Pale View of Hills

ALSO BY KAZUO ISHIGURO

In the face of the misery he saw in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he envisioned a strong and powerful Japan of the future, and put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the devastation of that war, his memories of his youth and of the “floating world”—the nocturnal realm of pleasure, entertainment, and drink — offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise as an artist. Drifting in disgrace in postwar Japan, indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.

Fiction/Literature

As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special — and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go administers its revelations as precisely as drops of acid.

Fiction

The highly acclaimed first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of the Hills is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her eldest daughter. In a story where past and present confuse in a haunting and sometimes macabre way, she relives scenes of Japan’s devastation in the wake of World War II, even as she recounts the weirdnesses and calamities of her own life.

Fiction/Literature

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in a postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served.

Fiction/Literature

The setting is a Central European city where a renowned pianist has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past. In The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro creates a work that is itself a virtuoso performance, deeply strange, hauntingly familiar, and resonant with humanity and wit.

Fiction/Literature

Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early twentieth-century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when both his mother and father disappear under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective, and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of their disappearances. Brilliantly crafted — a feat of both complex logic and soaring imagination — rich in emotional and psychological detail, When We Were Orphans is Kazuo Ishiguro at his astonishing best.

Fiction/Literature